The smoke from the wildfires has been terrible at our place this week, but we were fortunately able to go into Fort Collins where the smoke wasn't so bad for the Sunrise Equestrian Mini-Trial on Saturday. Due to one thing and another, Raven hasn't completed all three phases of a horse trial at one event in a couple years. She does all three phases quite well in schooling, so I entered her at training level so I could ride first and get home early before the heat and too many people had arrived.
Raven was definitely amped up for dressage, at a new location where she'd never been before. I got a couple nice moments in the warmup in between her screams for friends (she didn't want to be the only horse in that field!)
Her test went reasonably well considering the circumstances: never been to this location, really needs a dental, one of the first horses to go so warming up solo, and there's always the circumstance of her being a very hot horse.
The judge was very kind, and gave us some really great scores. Raven got a 7 on her gaits, on her free walk, and her medium walk. The comments at the end included "Very nice mare. Tactful rider on extremely hot horse."
When we get shots like these dressage canter ones, I always want to caption them with "Ride and OTTB - get your dressage test done faster!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6ILuvFlsz8
Show jumping went really nicely. Raven was very careful and didn't touch a thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfAJzizxKf4
After show jumping we headed over to the cross country course. Raven excelled here, too. She did look at a few fences, but never stopped. It's interesting to see photos of 15.3h Raven with these jumps compared to 17h Highboy - he makes them look small but she has some serious spring!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5nFu6oQyzU
I was so pleased with how Raven went today. She's such a small athletic sports car of a horse, and she's so responsive to me and all business on course. Kimberly Hale Photography got these incredible shots, and Sara took the videos. All Raven needs is some more show mileage (she's already an old hand on trail rides and going schooling) and she'll really be on her way. The icing on the cake this time was the matching yellow ribbon we took home.
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